now united in one current to our mutual advantage.  His habits were altered to suit the new life.  He stayed in now so as not to lose me when I went for a walk, and when returning, instead of going back to his kennel, he followed me in and threw himself down, all wet, on the rug before the fire.  His master and mistress came in and stared in astonishment.  It was against the rules of the house!  They ordered him out and he looked at them without moving.  Then they spoke again very sharply indeed, and he growled a low buzzing growl without lifting his chin from his paws, and they had to leave him!  He had transferred his allegiance to a new master and head of the pack.  He was under my protection and felt quite safe:  if I had taken any part in that scene it would have been to order those two persons who had once lorded it over him out of the room!

I didn’t really mind his throwing over his master and taking possession of the rug in my sitting-room, but I certainly did very keenly resent his behaviour towards the birds every morning at breakfast-time.  It was my chief pleasure to feed them during the bad weather, and it was often a difficult task even before Jack came on the scene to mix himself in my affairs.  The Land’s End is, I believe, the windiest place in the world, and when I opened the window and threw the scraps out the wind would catch and whirl them away like so many feathers over the garden wall, and I could not see what became of them.  It was necessary to go out by the kitchen door at the back (the front door facing the sea being impossible) and scatter the food on the lawn, and then go into watch the result from behind the window.  The blackbirds and thrushes would wait for a lull to fly in over the wall, while the daws would hover overhead and sometimes succeed in dropping down and seizing a crust, but often enough when descending they would be caught and whirled away by the blast.  The poor magpies found their long tails very much against them in the scramble, and it was even worse with the pied wagtail.  He would go straight for the bread and get whirled and tossed about the smooth lawn like a toy bird made of feathers, his tail blown over his head.  It was bad enough, and then Jack, curious about these visits to the lawn, came to investigate and finding the scraps, proceeded to eat them all up.  I tried to make him understand better by feeding him before I fed the birds; then by scolding and even hitting him, but he would not see it; he knew better than I did; he wasn’t hungry and he didn’t want bread, but he would eat it all the same, every scrap of it, just to prevent it from being wasted.  Jack was doubtless both vexed and amused at my simplicity in thinking that all this food which I put on the lawn would remain there undevoured by those useless creatures the birds until it was wanted.

Even this I forgave him, for I saw that he had not, that with his dog mind he could not, understand me.  I also remembered the words of a wise old Cornish writer with regard to the mind of the lower animals:  “But their faculties of mind are no less proportioned to their state of subjection than the shape and properties of their bodies.  They have knowledge peculiar to their several spheres and sufficient for the under-part they have to act.”